§ 1. There are two rocks against which religion and piety, if they turn aside from their right course, are dashed and frequently shattered. One can be seen from afar, for it rises above the waves and openly threatens those sailing by with the sea’s immense ridge; the other lies hidden beneath the waves and catches the unwary, and therefore is avoided only by the skilled and vigilant. Those rocks are impiety and superstition. Hence there are two kinds of those who administer the state: one plainly of atheists, the other of the superstitious.
Those who are altogether atheists rejoice to be called politicians, by an altogether false name; for nothing is more opposed to civil prudence than atheism and ignorance and contempt of God. Nevertheless, atheists, or pseudo-politicians, hold a twofold opinion concerning the governance of the state. For some openly remove from its midst not only all religion but also superstition. They follow the Epicureans and Diagoras, as Mezentius does:
My right hand is my god, and the weapon that, as a missile, I hurl.
And older than Mezentius was Capaneus, who was heard speaking in the midst of the stars, in book 10 of the Thebaid:
Do no divine powers stand for trembling Thebes? Where are those sluggish offspring of the infamous earth, Bacchus and Alcides? It is irksome to challenge lesser beings. You rather should come—for who is worthier To meet us? See, Semele’s ashes and tomb are held here. Come now, Jupiter, strain against me with all your flames. Are you stronger at frightening timid girls with thunder And destroying the towers of your father-in-law Cadmus?
Antiquity sings to us of such Giants and Aloadae; but those accursed prodigies among humankind have never been wanting. Dionysius plundered temples as a jest; Brennus likewise plundered Delphi, and others did the same. Nor were they wanting in Christian times. Frederick II said that there had been three distinguished impostors who had led the human race astray: Moses, Christ, and Muhammad. Many now tend toward the same position, for, since amid so great a variety of religions they cannot choose any, they are without all religion.
I have long been arguing against these men. For they are little concerned about the piety, justice, and innocence of their peoples; they hold it sufficient if they use them as subjects and if they obey their will. Indeed, they desire them to be devoted to crimes, enervated by lusts, and given exclusively to pleasures, lest they dare to move anything against their rule. Among them one sin alone is acknowledged and punished: the crime of injured human majesty. But they err, and by their error overthrow both themselves and the state. For it cannot happen that they govern gently a people depraved by pride, luxury, anger, and avarice. Such people therefore need a harsh and imperious ruler, just as untamed horses with defiant mouths must be restrained by a sharper bridle and hard curb-bits. Then from license arises greatness of expenditure; from this, poverty, whose offspring are injustice, theft, rebellion, and a desire to disturb or overthrow the state.
§ 2. The other kind of atheists consists of those who are themselves held by no superstition, yet judge that the common people must be oppressed by the terrors of the shades of divine powers. They add ceremonies to ceremonies and divinities to divinities—irreligious founders of various religions. Very many magistrates of states have done this, and Varro teaches that it was already long ago established as custom. He says that there are many true things which it is not only not useful for the common people to know, but also many things which, although false, it is expedient for the people to judge otherwise; and that for this reason the Greeks enclosed initiations and mysteries in secrecy.
“Here certainly,” says Augustine in book 4, chapter 31, “he betrayed the whole counsel, as it were, of the wise men through whom states and peoples were to be governed.” And in chapter 32: “He also says that, concerning the generations of the gods, peoples were inclined more toward the poets than toward the natural philosophers, and therefore that their ancestors—that is, the ancient Romans—believed both in the sex and the generations of the gods and established their marriages. This assuredly appears to have been done for no other reason than that it was the business of supposedly prudent and wise men to deceive the people in matters of religion and, in that very thing, not only to worship but even to imitate the demons, whose desire to deceive is very great. For just as demons cannot possess any except those whom they have beguiled by deceiving, so too human princes—not indeed just men, but men like demons—recommended to the peoples as true, under the name of religion, things which they knew to be vain, in this way binding them, as though more tightly, to civil society, so that they might possess them similarly as subjects.”
“But what weak and unlearned person would escape at once deceitful princes of the state and demons?”
Cicero, in book 1 of On the Nature of the Gods, teaches that Augustine does them no injury: “Who was ever so blind in contemplating things that he did not see that these forms of human beings had been transferred to the gods either by some design of the wise, so that they might more readily turn the minds of the unskilled from the depravity of life toward the worship of the gods; or through superstition, so that there might be images which, when venerating them, they would believe themselves to approach the gods themselves? Moreover, poets, painters, and craftsmen increased these same things. But it was not easy to represent gods doing and contriving anything in the likeness of other forms.”
§ 3. This whole kind of superstition must therefore be driven out; for it matters little whether superstition is introduced into the state by a superstitious man or by an atheist.
The harms of superstition are indeed great. First, because it is itself a pretender to, and corrupter of, true religion, and by error holds minds captive as though in chains. Plutarch marvels in his Camillus:
ἀνθρωπίνην ἀσθένειαν, ὅρον οὐκ ἔχουσαν οὐδὲ κρατοῦσαν αὑτῆς, ἀλλ’ ἐκφερομένην ὅπου μὲν εἰς δεισιδαιμονίαν καὶ τῦφον, ὅπου δ’ εἰς ὀλιγωρίαν τῶν θείων καὶ περιφρόνησιν.
He marvels at human weakness, having no limit but rushing beyond bounds, here into superstition and pride, there into neglect and contempt of the gods. Superstition, therefore, belongs to timid and petty minds and makes states liable to impostors. Indeed, by the appearance of piety it makes human beings not merely servile but even childish.
§ 4. Next, excessive anxiety about worshipping and fearing God makes minds anxious—indeed, it makes human beings foolish and ridiculous. Thus it particularly assails barbarians, little women, and those whose judgment in discerning matters is weak from youth or old age. I know that among the Romans, even when already cultivated, superstition was great; but its fabricators were generally objects of mockery. Numerius Atticus indeed swore that he had seen Augustus ascend into heaven, but no one believed him, not even Livia, although for so infamous a perjury she had paid the man a million sesterces.
§ 5. Third, worshippers of vain divine powers and those addicted to superstitions never remain in the middle, but pass into vain, absurd, horrible, and shameful things. For superstition is a dreadful thing, and there is no crime so foul to tell or deed so monstrous that it has not driven into it minds subject to false religion and opposed to truth.
Augustine, however, sets forth its miserable and ridiculous vanity in book 6, chapter 10 of The City of God: “Certainly the freedom which this man”—Seneca—“lacked to dare to censure openly this civil theology, which was most like the theatrical one, as Varro censured the latter, was not altogether lacking to Annaeus Seneca, whom we discover from certain indications to have flourished in the times of our apostles; it was lacking not entirely, but in some part. For it was present to him when he wrote, but absent when he lived. For in that book which he composed against superstitions, he censures this civil and urban theology much more copiously and vehemently than Varro does the theatrical and fabulous theology. For when he treated of images, he says: ‘They dedicate the sacred, immortal, and inviolable gods in the vilest and immovable material; they clothe them in the shapes of human beings, beasts, and fishes, while some clothe them in mixed sex and differing bodies. They call things divine powers which, if they suddenly met us after receiving breath, would be considered monsters.’
“Then a little afterward, when, commending natural theology, he had arranged the opinions of certain philosophers, he posed a question to himself and said: ‘Someone will say in this place: Am I to believe that heaven and earth are gods, and that some are above the moon and others below it? Am I to endure either Plato or the Peripatetic Strato, of whom one made God without a body, the other without a mind?’ And, responding to this, he says: ‘What then? Do the dreams of Titus Tatius, or Romulus, or Tullus Hostilius appear truer to you? Tatius dedicated the goddess Cloacina; Romulus, Picus and Tiberinus; Hostilius, Pavor and Pallor, the ugliest affections of human beings, of which one is the motion of a terrified mind, the other of the body—not even a disease, but a color. Will you rather believe these divine powers and receive them into heaven?’
“But concerning the cruelly shameful rites themselves, how freely did he write? ‘One,’ he says, ‘cuts off his male parts; another cuts his arms. Where they fear angry gods, how will they merit those gods as propitious? But gods ought not to be worshipped at all if they desire this. So great is the madness of a mind disturbed and driven from its seat, that the gods are appeased in a manner in which not even the most savage human beings and those whose cruelty has been handed down in tales rage. Tyrants have torn apart the limbs of some men; they ordered no one to tear apart his own. Some have been castrated for the pleasure of royal lust; but no man, at his master’s command, laid hands upon himself lest he be a man. They cut themselves to pieces in the temples; with their wounds and blood they make supplication. If anyone has leisure to observe what they do and what they suffer, he will find things so unbecoming to the honorable, so unworthy of the free, so unlike the sane, that no one would doubt that they were mad if they were mad with fewer companions; as it is, the multitude of the insane is the defense of their sanity.’
“Next, the things which he relates were customarily done on the Capitol itself, and which he convicts altogether fearlessly—who would believe them to be done except by mockers or madmen? For when he had derided how in the Egyptian rites the loss of Osiris was mourned but soon afterward there was great rejoicing at his discovery, although his loss and discovery are fabricated, while that grief and joy are truthfully expressed by those who had lost nothing and found nothing, he says: ‘Yet this madness has an appointed time. It is tolerable to be insane once a year. Come to the Capitol: you will be ashamed of the publicly displayed madness and of the duties which vain frenzy has assigned to itself. One submits names to the god; another announces the hours to Jupiter; one is a lictor, another a conveyer, who by the vain motion of his arms imitates one conveying. There are women who arrange the hair of Juno and Minerva, standing far from the temple—not merely from the image—and moving their fingers in the manner of those adorning hair. There are women who hold a mirror; there are those who summon the gods as sureties for their court appearances. There are men who offer petitions and teach them their case. A learned arch-mime, an old man now decrepit, daily performed a mime on the Capitol, as though the gods gladly watched one whom human beings had ceased to watch. Every kind of craftsman, laboring for the immortal gods, sits idle there.’
“And a little afterward: ‘Yet these,’ he says, ‘even if they promise the god a superfluous service, promise one neither shameful nor infamous. Certain women sit on the Capitol who think themselves loved by Jupiter; they are not terrified even by the sight of Juno—most irascible, if you wish to believe the poets.’”
§ 6. Let those things be ridiculous; but how shameful are others? The Babylonians prostituted the whole sex in the worship of their divine power; I prefer to pass over the shameful acts of others in silence. Let us consider the cruelty of superstition. They slaughtered human victims to Tauric Diana and brought foreigners to the altar; nor were the Greeks more merciful, to whom it is said:
With blood you appeased the winds, and by a maiden’s slaughter; With blood must the return be sought, and atonement made with an Argive life.
For many, too, the bloody oracle of a demon was destruction:
Καὶ κεφαλὰς Ἅιδῃ, καὶ τῷ πατρὶ πέμπετε φῶτα.
And send heads to Pluto, and to the father send a man. Lights.
When danger threatened Rome, a Greek man and a Greek woman, a Gallic man and a Gallic woman, were buried alive in the earth. At Carthage noble youths were burned to Saturn. The very people of God sacrificed their sons to the idol Moloch. The king of the Moabites offered his firstborn son and heir to the kingdom upon the wall to a demon. Heliogabalus and Julian examined the entrails and fibers of human beings who had been sacrificed. The Malabars, from no hatred but solely from superstition, hurled weapons among themselves; but those who fell among them were judged blessed. American priests gave plucked-out eyes in honor of the sun. Superstition is therefore of the greatest danger if an unskilled multitude is stirred up against the senate, king, or chief men. What crimes will a state flee when an opinion of religion and sanctity drives it to such atrocities? Great, therefore, was the error of the wise men whose foolish heart was darkened: to commend such great crimes to peoples under the name of religion.
§ 7. Fourth, many examples declare this. Daniel 14:26: “Daniel therefore took pitch, fat, and hair, and boiled them together; and he made lumps and gave them into the dragon’s mouth, and the dragon burst asunder. And he said: Behold what you worshipped. When the Babylonians had heard this, they were exceedingly indignant; and, assembled against the king, they said: The king has become a Jew. He has destroyed Bel, killed the dragon, and slain the priests. And when they had come to the king they said: Hand Daniel over to us, otherwise we will kill you and your house. The king therefore saw that they pressed violently upon him and, compelled by necessity, handed Daniel over to them. They cast him into the lions’ den, and he was there six days. Moreover, in the den there were seven lions, and two bodies and two sheep were given to them daily; and these were then not given to them, so that they might devour Daniel.”
The imposture of the petty sacrificers had been detected and the beast burst asunder; but superstition was so opposed to truth, or so heedless of the fact, that the whole city rose against the king himself. Thus superstition is not only imperious but seditious. The Magi among the Persians commanded kings; Egyptian priests were no less fearsome to kings. Superstition pronounced law even to the Roman Empire. Metellus the pontifex maximus detained Postumius, the Flamen of Mars, who was consul, lest he depart for war in Africa and abandon the rites of Mars. Because Tiberius Gracchus said that he had taken the augural tent defectively, he brought it about that, by order of the senate, Gaius Figulus returned from Gaul and Scipio Nasica from Corsica. Publius Clodius Siculus, Marcus Cornelius Cethegus, and Gaius Claudius, because the entrails had been brought to the altars of the immortal gods with too little care, were at various times and in different wars ordered—and even compelled—to resign the flaminate. Livy, book 26.
There are innumerable examples of these things. But certainly, if commands were taken away from Sulla, Marius, Caesar, Pompey, and Antony because of trifles of this kind, truly they would make all things pay for it with a great slaughter. And yet how often did they observe signs from the sky? How often by auspices did they disturb elections, wars, and peace? Hence Augustine spoke most truly: “Rome lived more happily with fewer gods”; for the greater number filled minds with superstition and emptied houses. Cicero perceived the same thing; for, lest his house be restored to him, its site was consecrated by his enemies.
I pass over what occurred in Christian times. The world has suffered very many things because superstition raged with savagery and avarice. Tertullian reproaches the gentiles with this in chapter 44 of the Apology: “But no one observes that injury to the state, as great as it is real; no one weighs that injury to the state, when so many just persons are expended, when so many innocent persons are squandered. For now we call your own proceedings to witness—you who preside daily over the trials of prisoners, who conclude indictments with sentences. So many guilty persons are reviewed by you under various indictments of crimes: which of them is an assassin? Which a cutpurse? Which a temple-robber, or a corrupter, or a robber of bathers? Which of them is also inscribed as a Christian? Or, when Christians are brought forward under their own designation, which of them is also such as all those guilty persons? From your people the prison always seethes; from your people the mines always sigh; on your people the beasts are always fattened; from your people the providers of spectacles feed their herds of criminals. No Christian is there, unless he is simply only a Christian; or, if he is something else also, he is no longer a Christian.”
§ 8. In the history of the Jews also, public calamities followed superstition. Jerubbaal, the bravest of the leaders, was demanded for punishment because he destroyed the altar of Baal. Jeremiah was stoned, and the remnants of the land of Israel departed into Egypt. In the time of the Maccabees, the Sadducees and Pharisees disturbed the state and brought destruction upon the royal family. What formerly harmed the Palaeologi, what harmed the Bohemians, except error and rivalry in false religion? What of the dreadful superstition of the Calvinists today? Is it not an inciter of rebellions, and does it not contrive the increase of its sect through civil bloodshed? There can be no honorableness in that sect in which falsehood is law, the devil religion, and factions the works.
§ 9. Fifth, God is truth; only by true things is advancement made with him. The society of the human race is from nature and from truth; only by true things is advancement made in it. Therefore, when action is taken through simulation and fraud, the return upon lying is small: amid so many who have eyes, the people are not deceived for long. Every superstition, because it consists in opinion, is easily changed; and because it consists in an absurd opinion alien to reason, even those who seemed most obstinate become ashamed of their madness. For what if someone instructs the wretched and shows that it is not human beings who are preserved by images, but images by human beings?
Therefore, the prince who deprives those subject to vain religions of their reason is in perpetual danger lest a fraud so well known to the wise become known also to the deceived peoples. Once that error has been removed, whatever protection there was in superstition will go away into smoke—indeed, it will turn into hatred and contempt. For when the people understand that they have been led into fraud by empty and vain things, that through panic fear they have suffered loss of property or reputation, that they have trembled without cause, and that they have been an object of mockery to the prince or aristocrats, they are no less indignant than if they had been confined by prison and chains and bound to another’s will. For this is the nature of human beings: no one wishes to be deceived, and one who has been deceived turns his anger against the author of the deception.
That fraud never remains hidden, because by its increase and mass it is compelled to betray itself. The Romans once believed that the gods existed. But after altars began to be decreed to proconsuls, after the flattery of the Smyrnaeans established a temple to Porcius, after the Alabandans imitated a servile religion, who did not laugh at the novel gods? Especially since those new heavenly beings were consecrated whom no sane person would wish to have as parents. When Augustus, while alive, was worshipped through altars and flamens; when Livia was priestess of her husband and made him by poison, from a terrestrial god, a celestial one; when all the provinces imitated this—and kings too, or assuredly were compelled to it; for neglect of the rites of Augustus was charged against the Cyzicenes, with crimes of violence added, and they therefore lost the liberty given during the Parthian war—what wise person did not laugh when
he saw Caligula come forth in the garb of Hercules or Venus? When he saw Augustus, adorned with thunderbolts and rays, placed upon an altar? Indeed, when he saw that house approached through temples? But although in reality no one believed it, they nevertheless said that they believed it.
Pliny speaks absurdly in his Panegyric of Trajan: “Tiberius dedicated Augustus to heaven, but so that he might introduce back again the charge of injured majesty; Nero dedicated Claudius, but so that he might mock him; Titus dedicated Vespasian, and Domitian dedicated Titus—but the former so that he might be seen as the son of a god, the latter as a brother. You have restored your father to the stars, not to inspire fear in the citizens, not in contempt of the divine power, not for your own honor, but because you believe him to be a god.”
What are you saying, most prudent man and, unless I am mistaken, most studious of all human beings? Your Quirites made so many gods whom they did not believe to be gods.
With a flamen and altars he worshipped Augustus; with a calf and lamb he appeased him; The inscriptions bear witness, the decrees of the senate disclose it, Establishing a Caesarean temple in the likeness of Jupiter’s.
Pliny does not believe that they were gods, nor does he believe that the Romans believed it. Yet he says that Trajan believed his father to be a god. What then? Did Pliny believe it? How does he believe Trajan’s father to be a god if neither Augustus, nor Claudius, nor Vespasian, nor Titus was a god? Or again, if Trajan had not come to the empire, would his parent have been worshipped as a divine power?
§ 10. This evil is ancient: kings’ ambition for divine honors. Curtius, in book 8, relates the speech of Cleon, a man of the most abject flattery, in which he speaks on behalf of Alexander’s divinity. He says that the Persians acted not only piously but also prudently in mingling their kings among the gods, since the majesty of command is the safeguard of safety. They acted impiously and imprudently: impiously, because they adored the most abominable human beings as the holiest divine powers; imprudently, because, when they saw them take pleasure in an empty and false honor, they did not judge them worthy even of a moderate honor, but made them proud and hateful to their peoples. For divine honor, transferred to kings among human beings by sacrilege, afflicted both the kings themselves and the kingdom.
Certainly no divinity defended Cyrus from death, nor did the queen of the Massagetae judge him a god when she enclosed his head with Persian blood in a skin. No one believed Cambyses, the son of Cyrus, who was endowed with the vilest morals and was the murderer of his brother and his sister, who was also his wife, to be a god—any more than the Egyptian bull which Cambyses slaughtered. The sword proved that Cambyses was not a god when, falling from its sheath as he mounted his horse, it inflicted a deadly wound upon his thigh. The Magi, having ruled for a few months, were killed without any reverence for royal divinity. Darius followed; being more moderate, he reigned more happily. Xerxes, although he almost believed himself a god, wrote letters to mountains and inflicted lashes upon the sea; he was killed by Artabanus. After seven months of tyranny, Artabanus paid the penalty.
The longest rule was that of Artaxerxes Longimanus, who, as it appears, was a worshipper of God; for he commanded that the building of Jerusalem and the temple be completed and held the most holy man Nehemiah exceptionally dear. And so he administered the kingdom happily for forty years. Next, the divinity of Sogdianus lasted only seven months. Artaxerxes was wounded by Cyrus, who neither loved his brother nor feared God. Nor did Darius, the son of Artaxerxes, ever regard him as a god; for if he had thought him a god, he would neither have sought his concubine Aspasia nor, after sending in Tiribazus, have attempted to inflict an abominable murder upon his father. But neither did Artaxerxes regard his son Darius, whom he had made king, as a god; nor did the princes of Persia, by whose judgment he was slaughtered as a parricide. Ochus then came to the throne after killing his brothers, but was killed by the general Bagoas. Arsames, the son of Ochus, was made king by Bagoas and was destroyed four years later. The last of the kings was Darius Codomannus, whom Alexander overthrew; he was treated contemptuously by his own friends and slaughtered with immense cruelty.
§ 11. From this certainly the faithful person will learn the rectitude of divine judgments; but the impious man and impostor will learn that superstition and vain fears instilled into the people not only do not help to protect a kingdom but greatly harm it. For they prepare hatred and contempt. The Roman emperors can also serve as evidence. While they lived, divine honors were lavished upon them and altars were set up upon which oaths had to be sworn by their name; yet, when the least occasion was given, the Romans dragged their new gods with the hook and hurled them down the Gemonian stairs.
Numa’s counsel, therefore, was imprudent: he thought that the most effective means of keeping the multitude—rude in those times—in its duty was to instill fear of the gods. For when that vain fear of monstrous divine powers was dispersed by some good ray of the light implanted by nature, they judged that there was no God, and through weariness with superstition stripped off all religion. Indeed, when a savage and ungovernable multitude has been captured by vain religion, it obeys seers better than leaders; but when it understands that the seer is betraying his trust and, like that oracle, “Philippizes” (φιλιππίζειν)—that is, favors Philip—it suppresses every consciousness of right and judges that there is no divine power, because where it believed that divine power alone resided, there it found sheer fraud.
Finally, superstition makes nations restless and mutable; experience has taught this. But where there is restlessness and changeableness, there too is sedition. The cause is that all false and vain things frequently change, and that, when religions suffer a defect in some slight ceremony, they judge all things to have been thrown into confusion. The Romans, certainly, in order to diminish the superstitions by which they were burdened, forbade Sibylline verses to be held and read privately. Dio, book 54. Augustus gathered together from every quarter and burned more than two thousand prophetic books, of both Greek and Latin kind, which circulated commonly under no authors or authors of little fitness; after making a selection, he stored these too in two gilded cases beneath the base of Palatine Apollo. Thus they also frequently persecuted foreign religions because they did not dare to recall their ancestral ones to the assay and anvil.
§ 12. The Egyptians were most tenacious of their superstitions. Cicero speaks truly of them in book 5 of the Tusculan Disputations: “Who does not know the custom of the Egyptians, whose minds are steeped in depraved errors? They would undergo execution sooner than violate an ibis, an asp, a cat, or a crocodile.” Diodorus Siculus describes a sedition born from superstition: “Ptolemy”—he says—“whom the Romans afterward restored to the kingdom, had at first been named ally and friend by the senate and people of Rome, and there was great public rejoicing and a gathering. Romans too were in the crowd, and among them a soldier by chance—for not intentionally—killed a cat. Shouting, anger, and tumult arose. Neither the ignorance of the wretched man, nor reverence for the Roman name, nor the king’s authority—although he had sent the foremost of his courtiers to quiet them and make entreaty—none of these things, I say, availed to prevent the man from immediately being torn apart by thousands of hands, so that nothing remained for funeral or pyre.”
The matter is therefore clear concerning the superstition of the Egyptians. Since the authors have much to say about their most restless life, I must recount a few things, so that it may appear that the companion of extreme obstinacy in superstition is the greatest levity and mutability. These are Hadrian’s words to the consul Servianus, by which he testifies that he learned that all Egypt was frivolous, wavering, and flitting about at every movement of rumor, and that its people were the most seditious, cowardly, and injurious. The cause was perpetual dissensions and conflicts over religion; for cities often join battle with one another over ridiculous things.
Next, those most religious people, who were set up by kings as though gladiators for mutual quarrels concerning divine powers—that is, garlic and onions, for these divine powers grew in gardens—were insolent and faithless toward kings. Seneca, in chapter 9 of the Consolation to Helvia, calls Egypt faithless; and in chapter 17 of the same discourse: “And so this talkative province, inventive in insults against its prefects—a province in which even those who avoided guilt did not escape ill repute—looked up to her as the one example of holiness; and, a thing most difficult for it, although dangerous witticisms also please it, restrained all license of words.” Herodian, book 4, says: “The Egyptians are by nature people disposed to mockery and formed for uttering taunts or jests. They hurl many of these against eminent men, things which appear pleasing or witty to themselves, but which bite and sting those against whom they are hurled.” Innumerable killings and disturbances followed these insults.
Examples are the kings called Philadelphi, Philometores, and Physcones—because of a brother and mother killed, and because of the fat of a pendulous belly. Although these names conveyed insults concerning crime, they nevertheless clung perpetually as though proper and family names. Flavius Vopiscus calls them windy, furious, boastful, injurious, and avid for revolution. Ammianus records that the Alexandrians were also deceitful, always thinking one thing and pretending another, becoming inflamed at every movement, contentious, and most vehement demanders of restitution. Philo of Alexandria, a domestic witness, also testifies to this in Against Flaccus. Juvenal, Satire 15.
Dio likewise says of the Alexandrians: “The Alexandrians have sufficient spirit to hear anything; and by nature they are most ready rashly to carry out in words whatever they have proposed to themselves. The same people are the most unfit of all for war and its labors, although in the seditions which occur among them both most frequently and on the greatest scale, they repeatedly come to killings and, through zeal for contending about the matter proposed, hold life in the greatest contempt and judge death in those conflicts to be a certain good especially to be sought.”
Thus the Egyptians were frivolous, discordant, and seditious, and in addition so fraudulent that their malicious cunning passed into a proverb. Aeschylus:
δεινοὶ πλέκειν τοι μηχανὰς Αἰγύπτιοι.
The Egyptians are excellent at contriving devices.
And Theocritus:
οὐδεὶς κακοεργὸς δαλεῖται τὸν ἰόντα παρέρπων Αἰγυπτιστί.
No evildoer harms the passer-by by creeping up in Egyptian fashion.
That these things were accustomed to arise, and to draw their habitual character, from sacred rites and superstitions is easy to gather from the things Herodotus relates in his Thalia. For because of an ibis, a cat, and other trifles, they raged so greatly:
We see peoples for whose anger it does not suffice To have killed someone, but who have believed his breast, arms, And face to be a kind of food.
§ 13. A poet indeed, but with historical truth, teaches that superstition is the source of all these evils—Juvenal, Satire 15:
Who does not know, Volusius Bithynicus, what monsters Demented Egypt worships? One part adores the crocodile; Another trembles before the ibis glutted with serpents. The golden image of the sacred long-tailed ape gleams Where the magic chords resound from half of Memnon, And ancient Thebes lies buried beneath its hundred gates. Here they venerate blue fishes; there, a fish of the river; Whole towns worship a dog; no one worships Diana. To violate a leek or onion and break it with a bite is sacrilege. O holy nations, for whom these divine powers grow In gardens! Every table abstains from wool-bearing animals; There it is sacrilege to slaughter the offspring of a she-goat; But it is permitted to feed on human flesh. When Ulysses, Astonishing him, related over dinner such a deed To Alcinous, perhaps in some he had stirred bile or laughter, As a lying teller of marvels. “No one casts this fellow Into the sea, worthy of the savage and genuine Charybdis, Who fabricates monstrous Laestrygonians and Cyclopes? For I would sooner believe in Scylla, or the Cyanean rocks Colliding, and skins full of tempests, Or Elpenor, struck with the slender wand of Circe, Grunting with his fellow oarsmen as pigs. Did he judge the Phaeacian people so empty-headed?” Thus someone not yet drunk would justly speak, one who had drawn The least wine from the Corcyraean jar; For this Ithacan alone sang these things, with no witness. We shall relate wonders indeed, but things done recently, When Iuncus was consul, above the walls of hot Coptus— A crime of the common people, and more grievous than all tragedies. For, though you unroll all the tragic robes, no people Among the tragedians commits a crime from the time of Pyrrha. Hear what example dreadful savagery has produced In our own age. Between neighboring peoples an old And ancient feud exists—an immortal hatred And a wound never to be healed. It still burns Between Coptus and Tentyra. Hence the highest fury On both sides among the common people, because each place hates The divine powers of its neighbors, since each believes that only Those gods whom it itself worships ought to be held as gods. But at the festival of one people, all the leading men And commanders of its enemies thought the opportunity should be seized, Lest they should feel the glad and cheerful day, the great joys Of a feast, with tables set and arranged at the temples, And with a couch kept wakeful, on which the seventh sun sometimes Finds a man lying through night and day. Egypt is savage indeed; But, so far as I myself have observed, in luxury its barbarous throng Does not yield to infamous Canopus. Add that victory is easy Over men drenched, stammering, and staggering from unmixed wine. On one side, therefore, there was men’s dancing to a black piper,
Perfumes of every kind, flowers, and many garlands on the forehead; On the other, fasting hatred. But the first quarrels begin To resound in their burning minds. These are the trumpet of the brawl. Then they meet with equal shouting, and the naked hand Rages in place of a weapon. Few cheeks are without a wound; In the whole contest scarcely anyone—or no one—has a nose intact. You could now see throughout all the ranks half-faces, Faces of another form, bones gaping from broken cheeks, And fists filled with blood from eyes. Yet they themselves believe that they are playing and exercising Childish battle lines, because they tread upon no corpses. And, indeed, why should so many thousands of a brawling crowd Do so, if all are alive? Therefore the attack grows fiercer, And now with arms bent they begin to hurl stones Sought along the ground—the weapons of domestic sedition— But not a stone such as Turnus and Ajax hurled, Nor of the weight with which the son of Tydeus struck Aeneas’ thigh; Rather one which right hands unlike theirs, born in our age, Are able to discharge. For this race was already diminishing While Homer lived. The earth now produces evil and puny men. Therefore whatever god looked on laughs and hates them. Let the story be resumed after this digression. When one side, Increased by reinforcements, dares to draw iron And renew the battle with hostile arrows, all who dwell In neighboring Tentyra, shaded by palms, press upon the backs Of those who excel in rapid flight. Here one man slips, Hastening his course through excessive fear, and is caught. The victorious crowd cuts him into very many pieces And little portions, so that one dead man may suffice for many; With the bones gnawed clean, it eats him whole. It did not cook him In a blazing bronze cauldron or upon spits; so long And slow did it judge waiting for fires, content with the raw corpse. Here one may rejoice that it did not violate the fire Which Prometheus, snatched from the highest region of heaven, Gave to the earth. I congratulate the element, and think that you too Exult. But the man who endured biting the corpse Never ate anything more gladly than this flesh. For in so great a crime, do not ask and doubt whether The first throat felt pleasure. But the last man, Who stood when the whole body had already been consumed, Draws his fingers along the ground and tastes something of the blood. The Vascones, as report has it, prolonged their lives By the use of such foods; but the case is different. There The blame there lies with fortune: the extremity of wars, extreme circumstances, And the dreadful famine of a long siege. For this example of food which is now at issue ought to be pitiable. The people just mentioned, after all herbs and every animal, After whatever the madness of an empty belly compelled, While their pallor and leanness and thin limbs moved even enemies To pity, tore with famine limbs not their own, ready To eat their own also. What human being or god would have denied Pardon to those who suffered dreadful and monstrous things, And whom the very shades of those whose bodies they ate Could forgive? Zeno’s precepts give us better counsel, For he judges that some things, not all, must be done for life. But whence was the Cantabrian a Stoic, especially In the age of the ancient Metellus? Now the whole world Has Greek and Roman Athens. Eloquent Gaul has taught The Britons to be advocates; Thule now speaks of hiring a rhetorician. Nevertheless, that noble people of whom we spoke—and Saguntum, Equal in courage and fidelity but greater in disaster—excuses Some such deed. Egypt, more savage than the altar by the Maeotic Sea, Does not. For the Tauric altar, inventress of the abominable rite, Sacrifices human beings, so that you may believe the poems which now Hand these things down to be worthy of trust—but no more than that. The victim fears nothing further or more grievous than the knife. What accident drove these men? What so great hunger, what arms Hostile to their rampart, compelled them to dare so detestable A monstrosity? Or would they create another object of reproach For land dry around Memphis when the Nile was unwilling to rise? With a madness in which neither terrible Cimbri nor Britons, Fierce Sauromatae, nor monstrous Agathyrsi ever raged, This unwarlike and useless common people rages, Accustomed to spread little sails upon earthenware skiffs And lean upon the short oars of painted pottery. You will find no penalty for the crime, nor will you devise Punishments worthy of peoples in whose mind anger And hunger are equal and alike.
§ 14. To all these is added a greater evil, and one dangerous to those who reign: namely, concern for future things, auspices, entrails, and the impostures and profits of seers. By these whole nations have often been sent into the greatest dangers. Croesus, deceived by an oracle, became the mockery of his enemy. Demons, by lying, drew Julian into Persia. The seers sang:
We gods shall go against Theren; victory is certain. I, Mars, unconquered in arms among the gods, shall be the leader.
Indeed, even Ahab, a patron of impious superstition, was deceived by his prophets and destroyed himself, his army, and his family. This thing frequently afflicted the Gauls and Germans. Plutarch, in his Caesar: “Moreover, the prophecies of their divining women disturbed them more, women who foretold the future by inspecting the eddies of rivers and observing the windings and noises of streams. They forbade battle to be joined before the new moon had shone. When these things had been reported, Caesar, since he perceived that the Germans were at rest, judged that he would act best if he fought with them while they were sluggish rather than, by awaiting their times, fail in his desire. And so, by attacking their fortifications and the mounds on which they had settled, he harassed and provoked them so that they descended with fury to fight. After routing them with immense slaughter, he pursued them thirty-seven thousand five hundred paces all the way to the Rhine and filled this whole plain with corpses and spoils.”
Those predictions were also destructive to Spain. Our Mariana relates the affair in book 2, chapter 14 of The Education of a King: “It was harmful that Martin Barbuda, Master of Alcántara, deceived by a certain John, a magician who had long conducted a life secret from everyone and promised victory as though by divine admonition, contrary to the laws of the treaty recently struck
with the Moors, gathered a great but disorderly multitude of men under the appearance of religion and, while making an incursion into the territories of Granada, was surrounded by the enemy’s onset and perished with all his men. And the eighth day commemorating Christ restored to life, white both in fact and in name, was turned black; and by a noble example it was established that fraud is often present beneath an extraordinary appearance of holiness.”
We therefore do not wish the prince readily to lend his ears to these human beings. We do not wish him to consume whole days and nights in prayers and anxiety of mind, which would be no less harmful. But he ought so to order himself that he does not labor greatly over future events; that he places the hope of safety in divine protection and piety; and that, to treat illnesses, he summons none other than those skilled in the medical art and employs wholesome herbs according to their counsel.
§ 15. But it is so clear that useful counsels are hindered by these things, that seditions, hopes of revolution, and plots arise, that no times of a pagan emperor were without them. For under what emperor were there not investigations against those who had consulted magicians concerning the prince’s life or his successor? Moreover, this great mystery of impiety vehemently afflicts the minds of the ignorant common people. To tremble at every movement, every advance, every voice, every meeting with either human being or beast, at the song of an ominous bird, at the flight of birds, at a morsel falling from the mouth of a chicken—and not only to tremble, but to lead out an army or confine it in camp, to cross the sea with a fleet or remain in harbor, and to govern the arts of war and peace—is of such great folly that it does not seem capable of befalling a human being.
Julian is terrified by a falling star and consults soothsayers, who advise him to do nothing. Augustus was of such a character regarding religions, as Suetonius says, that “he was somewhat excessively frightened by thunder and lightning, so that always and everywhere he carried the skin of a sea-calf around as a remedy; and at every suspicion of a greater storm he withdrew into a concealed and vaulted place, having once been terrified during a nocturnal journey by a flash of lightning,” as we said above.
Alexander was even more pitiable than Augustus; he conducted himself in such a way that there was nothing so small or absurd—provided only that it was unusual—which he did not turn into a prodigy or omen. Consequently, the palace was full of sacrificers, purifiers, and diviners.
But if an enemy rushed upon him while heaven thundered, would the veteran commander not hide himself in concealment? If the army were held by an equal fear, would it not become bloodless booty solely because its members falsely believed their own destruction to be indicated by the lightning?
§ 16. Superstition makes people trembling, unwarlike, and servile, just as true religion makes them spirited, brave, and confident in the protection of the divine power. The Egyptians, the most superstitious of nations, were unfit for war; they were almost always enslaved. Indeed, although they possessed so fertile a region, they ministered to foreigners in the vilest occupations. And so, by way of contempt, they were called ἀχθοφόροι, πλινθοφόροι—burden-bearers and carriers of bricks. Yet they were of a huge and sinewy body, which, however, they exercised not with arms but with servile burdens, because they possessed minds humbled by fear of the gods and pressed down toward the earth.
Thus Aristophanes jokes about those βαστάζοντας—“carriers”:
δύ’ ἅρματ’ εἰσέθηκε καὶ νεκρὼ δύο, οὓς οὐκ ἂν ἄραιντ’ οὐδ’ ἑκατὸν Αἰγύπτιοι.
He placed upon it two chariots and two dead men, Whom not even a hundred Egyptians could carry.
For how can there be a great spirit in one who venerates such worthless things as a divine power? Who locates the supreme good in the smallest things? How servile in spirit are the Turks? They say that the stars hang from golden chains; they superstitiously supply food to animals. Some Indians build hospices and palaces for birds, while meanwhile neglecting human beings. How superstitious are the Americans and Japanese! Yet they are all foolish, unwarlike, abject, and, as it were, born to serve. For since they are compelled to fear all things, they cannot be magnanimous.